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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Donnellan estate sat somewhere in the Virginia piedmont like a declaration — wide fields, a sturdy house, and the particular silence of a place that expects to be taken seriously. Nelson’s father had arrived from Ireland with nothing but ambition and an immigrant’s sharp hunger, and he had made himself into exactly the kind of man Virginia rewarded: a planter of substance, a figure of local consequence, a patriarch whose word settled matters before they became arguments. He had crossed an ocean to build something that would last. He intended his son to inherit it.
Nelson had other ideas.
He had been born in Baltimore in September of 1805 — his father in transit, perhaps, between the city’s counting houses and the piedmont fields, or his mother seeking a physician she trusted more than the country doctors of the interior. The details are gone. What remains is the fact: Nelson Donnellan opened his eyes in a city and grew up on a plantation, and both of those things shaped him, though in ways his father never intended.
He studied medicine. That much the elder Donnellan could accept — a physician son gave a Virginia family a certain additional respectability, a professional man among the planters, someone whose authority derived from knowledge rather than from mere acreage. He received his license in 1828, at twenty-two years old, and the certificate was the kind of document a father could point to with pride. So far, so good.
She was not the girl his father would have chosen. We know her now from the census record: Susan Sorber Siler, born in Pennsylvania in March of 1809, a woman of Pennsylvania Dutch stock whose quiet surname carried the plain, steady quality of families who built rather than inherited. Whatever the elder Donnellan said about her — and he said something, clearly, with finality and the implied weight of disinheritance behind every syllable — Nelson listened politely. Then he went and married her anyway.
He left Virginia with his bride and very little else. No deed to land, no letter of credit, no letter of introduction. Whatever farewell passed between father and son — if there was one at all — it was not warm. The frontier of Ohio lay to the northwest, and that was direction enough.
Preble County received them the way the frontier received everyone: without ceremony, without judgment, and with an almost brutal indifference to where you had come from. What mattered was what you could do. Nelson could do a great deal. He had trained as a physician, and in a county where the nearest doctor might be a day’s hard ride away, a man with a medical bag and steady hands was worth more than any Virginia pedigree.
He built his practice the slow way — the only way available on the frontier. He rode out in all weather, through the mud seasons of spring and the ice-locked roads of January, to farmsteads where children were burning with fever or men had taken axe wounds to the leg. He delivered babies in candlelit rooms and sat with old settlers through their last hours. He bled and purged and sutured and prescribed, working from a pharmacopoeia that was already half empirical wisdom and half educated guess, which was about as good as medicine got in Preble County in the 1830s. He charged what people could pay and sometimes accepted grain or labor when they couldn’t.
He lived as the frontier men lived: with a rifle over the fireplace, kept oiled and ready not for war but for the practical mathematics of frontier subsistence. Squirrels, rabbits, the occasional deer when the season was right. A man who kept a family fed on a frontier doctor’s irregular income learned to shoot early and shoot well. The rifle was not a symbol. It was a tool, like the medical bag, like the horse in the stable.
Susan kept the household and raised their children with the steady competence of a Pennsylvania Dutch woman who had never expected life to be easy and was not particularly surprised when it was not. The Donnellans of Preble County were, by the 1840s, a family of standing: a practiced physician, a capable wife, a growing household in Lanier Township, and a circle of professional acquaintance that reached well beyond the county line. That circle, as it turned out, reached very far indeed.
Among the names that moved through the Donnellan household with comfortable familiarity were those of men who would soon become famous for other reasons: Governor William Henry Seward of New York, and a Springfield lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. The 1898 biographical account of Nelson’s grandson notes simply, and without elaboration, that “the Strattons were intimate with the Seward and Lincoln families” — a line that raises more questions than it answers, and suggests a level of connection that the bare facts of a frontier physician’s life would not seem to explain. Nelson Donnellan was the thread.
Francis Joel Stratton was a young man out of the Erie Canal country of New York — the son of a farming family, broadly educated, restlessly ambitious, and set on medicine with the fixed determination of a man who has decided on his course and will not be turned from it. He made his way to Geneva Medical College in New York, and in the machinery of doors opening and letters circulating that governed admission to such institutions in the 1840s, Nelson Donnellan’s hand is visible. Family tradition holds that Nelson was a silent sponsor — a prominent physician, a friend of Dr. Kelsey who held sway at the college, and a man whose professional vouching for a young applicant could mean the difference between admission and rejection. He had agreed, as a favor to mutual friends who moved in the same circles as Seward, to use his standing on Joel’s behalf. The mechanisms were informal and invisible, as such things always were — a word over tea, a letter on professional stationery, a name invoked in the right company — but the outcome was real: Francis Joel Stratton was admitted and graduated in 1848.
And then, in the summer of 1847, while Joel was still a student, he came to a garden gathering in Preble County where Governor Seward was speaking on the subject of universal education.
Nelson Donnellan was there, of course. His family was there. And among them was his daughter Hester — blue-eyed, striking, poised and quick-witted by the account of everyone who knew her, a young woman who had grown up in a household where the names Seward and Lincoln were spoken at the supper table as naturally as the names of county neighbors. Joel, standing in the garden, found his attention caught by this young woman he had not met before. She glanced back, her look flickering to a companion. He resolved to find an introduction.
He found it. There was a brunch by the lake the next day, and somewhere in that afternoon Joel demonstrated a five-shot Colt revolver with accuracy enough to draw a remark from Seward himself — five shots, no reload, tight grouping at range. Whether it was the pistol or the man behind it, Hester took notice. By the end of that summer, a courtship was underway.
On February 21, 1850, Francis Joel Stratton and Hester Ann Donnellan were married in Preble County. By the summer census of that year, the young couple was keeping house in the dwelling immediately next door to the Donnellans in Lanier Township — with Joel’s young daughter Julia from his earlier marriage living under their roof as Hester’s stepdaughter. Medical licensure in Ohio in those years required documented supervised practice under an established physician. Nelson provided it: the father-in-law across the property line, teaching his new son the rounds of a frontier practice, one farmstead at a time. He had opened the door to Geneva Medical College; now he was completing the education that Geneva had begun.
He had done this himself, a generation earlier. He understood what it was to start without advantages and build toward them. He was, in the end, the kind of man who held doors open for the people coming behind him.
He was fifty-six years old when the war came for him.
The family had moved on by then — to Indianapolis, where the growing city offered the opportunities a physician of his standing deserved, and then to Anderson, Indiana, a modest but energetic town in Madison County that suited the quieter rhythms of his later years. Susan was with him, as she always had been: the Pennsylvania woman who had followed a Virginia doctor into the Ohio wilderness and made a life there that was, by any reasonable measure, better than the one they had left behind.
It had been coming for everyone, of course. The great grinding conflict had already consumed a year and a half of American life by the late summer of 1862, and most men Nelson’s age had already concluded that their part in it was to send their sons and pray. He had read the dispatches from Shiloh and Antietam in the Anderson newspapers with the practiced diagnostic eye of a physician — taking in the scale of the casualties, understanding in his bones what those numbers meant in terms of sawn bone and men left to die in wet fields without enough morphia to make the dying decent. He was too old for the muster. Everyone agreed about that.
September changed the equation.
General Edmund Kirby Smith’s Army of Kentucky had swept northward out of the South with alarming speed, and advance Confederate cavalry under General Henry Heth had pushed through Lexington, through Paris, through Covington, until they stood on the Kentucky bank of the Ohio River looking across at Cincinnati. On a clear day you could stand on the Cincinnati waterfront and see them taking shape on the southern shore, gray riders among the Kentucky hills, close enough that the muzzle flashes of their pickets’ rifles were visible at dusk. The city’s garrison was a handful of men against an army flushed with momentum.
General Lew Wallace — who would one day write Ben-Hur, but was for now a general who needed men — arrived on September 2nd to find a metropolis in controlled panic: bridges being barricaded, businesses shuttered, Black residents conscripted into labor gangs digging earthworks, a telegraph line burning with desperate messages in both directions. Ohio Governor David Tod issued the call that same day in the bluntest possible language: “The enemy is marching on Cincinnati. Come armed and equipped as quickly as possible.” Indiana’s governor followed within hours.
Nelson read the proclamation in his office and sat with it for a while.
Anderson was ninety miles from Cincinnati — a long day’s hard travel by rail, longer by road. The earthworks would be rough, sleeping on the ground with September nights edging toward cool, eating whatever the commissary scraped together for an improvised force materializing from every road and creek bottom in two states. He was a physician, not a soldier. He had a practice to return to, patients who needed him, a household that depended on his steadiness.
He also had a rifle.
One imagines the scene: the old physician pulling his gun down from wherever it lived in the house — the long-barreled piece that had fed his family through the lean years of Preble County and the leaner years of building a new practice. Checking the mechanism with the automatic attention of a man who had done this a thousand times. Then loading the medical bag — instruments, bandages, what medicines would travel. Telling Susan he was going.
Perhaps she said something short and frightened and true. Perhaps she understood, after thirty years of living with the man who had walked away from a Virginia estate on principle, that argument was not going to alter the outcome. She had given him her whole life. She could give him this.
They came pouring down every road toward the river — farmers who had left their harvests standing in the field, millworkers still dusty from the grindstone, blacksmiths and schoolteachers and old men who had fought in the Mexican War twenty years before. Most carried whatever they owned: squirrel rifles, fowling pieces, old muskets that had hung above fireplaces since Andrew Jackson’s time, a few pistols. Some came in boots; some did not. They wore no uniforms because they owned none. Within days there were fifteen thousand of them on the Union side of the river — a number that astonished Wallace and gave the Confederate commanders something to think about when they put their field glasses on the earthworks across the Ohio.
Nelson Donnellan found himself standing in a rifle pit on the south bank of the Ohio River, looking out across broken ground toward the Confederate positions on the hills beyond. The air smelled of the river and fresh-turned earth and the coal-smoke tang of a great city bracing itself.
The waiting was the hardest part.
He spent his days in the earthworks keeping his rifle clean and dry in the September rains, talking with the men around him: farmers who had left corn standing unharvested in the field, a blacksmith from Hamilton County whose hands were as large as dinner plates, an old man from Clermont County who claimed to have fought with Harrison at Tippecanoe and was very possibly telling the truth. They argued about who was the better shot in the way that Ohio and Indiana men had always argued about such things — with complete seriousness and absolutely no resolution.
He also worked as a physician. The earthworks produced their own casualties: men down with blisters and fever from hard marching, boys who had neglected to eat anything between home and the river and arrived half-collapsed from exhaustion. He went among them with his bag, doing what he had always done — looking, assessing, treating what could be treated, keeping company with what could not. A physician in a rifle pit is still a physician.
Across the river, General Heth studied the Union lines and recalculated his arithmetic. What faced him was not raw militia who might scatter at the first artillery round. These were men who had grown up hunting in the same Ohio and Indiana woodlands that produced the frontier riflemen who had humiliated British regulars at New Orleans. They carried weapons they had used since they were boys, in the hands of men who understood long-range accuracy in a way that few regular soldiers did. An assault crossing against fifteen thousand such men, dug in on a prepared riverbank, was a different proposition than the cavalry sweep through central Kentucky that had brought the Army of Kentucky to the river in the first place.
The Confederate probe hesitated. It stalled. By September 11th — nine days after the call had gone out — Kirby Smith’s army had turned away from the river. Cincinnati was safe.
Governor Tod issued a formal proclamation thanking the Squirrel Hunters by name — the only time in American history, as far as anyone could tell, that a governor had formally thanked an improvised civilian army by its own self-selected nickname. Their “prompt and patriotic response,” Tod wrote, had preserved the city. He was not wrong.
Nelson went home to Anderson. He had a practice to return to.
He lived to seventy-three. He died on the thirteenth of December, 1878, in Anderson, and they buried him three days later at Maplewood Cemetery on the south edge of town.
Susan outlived him. The 1880 Census finds her two years after his death in Muscatine, Iowa — gone west, perhaps to a son or other relative in the years immediately following her loss. But she came back. She died in Anderson on January 13, 1892, and was buried there beside the man she had followed out of Virginia to Ohio to Indiana — the man whose father had declared the match unsuitable, and who had spent the next fifty years being proved wrong.
Their daughter Hester had preceded them both to Indiana decades earlier, following her husband Francis Joel Stratton from Preble County through the years of his remarkable career as physician, constable, deputy U.S. marshal, and spy — a career that Nelson Donnellan had helped set in motion in the quiet machinery of letters and vouching that opened the door to Geneva Medical College. Frank Nelson Stratton was born on September 18, 1860, in Madison, Indiana. The Nelson in his name was not accidental. It was a small act of family memory — deliberate, chosen, the kind of thing that keeps the dead present in the lives of the living.
The rifle that went to Cincinnati is gone now. The medical bag is gone. Somewhere in Virginia, an old planter had once decided his son amounted to nothing. The son had spent the next fifty years proving him wrong, one patient at a time, one connection at a time, one September march at a time.
The name Frank Nelson Stratton is not gone.
Author’s Note: Dr. Nelson Donnellan (21 September 1805 – 13 December 1878) was the son of an Irish-born Virginia planter, a frontier physician of Preble County, Ohio, and Anderson, Indiana, and a Squirrel Hunter at the defense of Cincinnati, September 1862. His wife was Susan Sorber Siler (25 March 1809 – 13 January 1892), born in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Hester Ann Donnellan married Francis Joel Stratton; the full story of Francis Joel Stratton — physician, spy, deputy U.S. marshal, and friend of Lincoln and Seward — is told in Farmer, Lawman, Doctor, Spy. Frank Nelson Stratton served as attorney and state and county prosecutor of Howard County, Indiana. Nelson’s portrait (c. 1846–1851) and medical license certificate (1828) are preserved in the family archive. Primary source: Biographical and Genealogical History of Cass, Miami, Howard and Tipton Counties (Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1898). The scenes, dialogue, and interior lives are imagined.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.